Dead End (42 page)

‘My client declines to answer that question,' interrupted Hilda Jeffries, at once.

‘I think you should know that the FBI has obtained a court order enforcing full disclosure not just of the conclusions of internal hearings of that time, but also of inconclusive investigations,' announced Benton.

‘I wasn't advised of this application,' protested Brack, at once.

‘We were only advised ourselves of the application by counsel at the J. Edgar Hoover building a few minutes before this interview began,' said Dingley, easily.

‘This is something I need to discuss with my client,' said Hilda Jeffries. ‘Something Phil and I should definitely have been told earlier.'

‘This was the earliest opportunity,' insisted Dingley, un-repentantly.

‘Before this recorded interview began was an earlier opportunity,' insisted Hilda Jeffries, in return. ‘This could well become a court protest. Certainly this meeting will progress no further.'

‘They're dirty,' insisted Benton, an hour later in the 14th Street bar. ‘I got five bucks that says Harry and Pete Bellamy and maybe Helen Montgomery got investigated in 1996 but that there was insufficient proof to prosecute. Harry just got asked to leave. How's that sound?'

‘Sounds like a very feasible local police corruption deal,' agreed Dingley. ‘Which isn't an FBI problem or investigation.'

‘I know we're missing our terrorism link,' conceded Benton. ‘But a local police corruption deal
is
an FBI investigation if Metro DC police computers have been going beyond State borders and looking at things they shouldn't be looking at.'

‘That's a wild guess that gets us nowhere,' refused Dingley.

‘I think we've taken a step forward,' argued Benton.

‘Half a step,' cautioned Dingley. ‘All we've got in addition to lies is a lot of conjecture.'

‘I'm encouraged beyond towels and salt and pepper shakers,' said Benton. ‘And we shouldn't forget Dwight Newton had a look-see at Parnell's file, according to the log.'

‘No reason to leave him out,' accepted Dingley. ‘Let's give it the weekend for him to stop worrying – think we're not interested. We've got a lot of reading to do.'

‘You know what I'd like, just once?' said Benton.

‘What?'

‘To have an interview without a goddamned lawyer in the way.'

‘Law enforcement would be a hell of a lot easier without lawyers,' agreed Benton.

They ate at the Kennedy Centre before the concert. Inevitably they talked about Johnson's headline-grabbing arrest and previous day's bail release, and Parnell said there hadn't been an opportunity to ask the FBI agents if it was a break in the case – he'd hoped they would have called him if it were, which they hadn't. He had planned to contact them at the beginning of the following week, but as he and Beverley talked, Parnell remembered Dingley's assurance always to be reachable at the numbers they'd given him – surprised he'd forgotten – and decided to try the cellphone listings the next day. Work had started on the controlled toxicity-reduction of the newly arrived avian flu viruses but it was necessarily slow. No safe level had been established, which left nothing more to say which hadn't already been said during their customary and so far inconclusive end-of-the-day discussions. Beverley judged Ted Lapidus a good research-team leader, but thought Sean Sato would be the one most likely to make a discovery, and finished by saying: ‘And now I want to know about you.'

‘I'll get involved the moment we get to a controllable virus level,' promised Parnell, deciding against telling her of the most recent confrontation with Dwight Newton.

‘That wasn't the question,' she said.

‘I wouldn't have thought there's anything left to know about me,' said Parnell. ‘Let's hear about Beverley Jackson.'

‘Dull story,' she insisted. ‘Dad was an industrial chemist, so I guess I inherited the interest. Found I was good at it. Got caught up in the new science of genetics and wanted to prove I could be good at that too, which is why I came after the Dubette job. Didn't think you were particularly impressed by me at the job interview, incidentally. Didn't believe I stood a chance. Not sure how I feel about the company itself – I've got to see Wayne Denny next week, by the way, about this psychology nonsense. Sean's decided to go ahead and take it. Thinks to refuse will screw him up with the company. That's about it.'

‘You missed out marriage and Barry.' Would she tell him about the one time they'd lied to each other? he wondered.

‘College romance, stars in our eyes,' she said. ‘Didn't live together long enough to get to know each other. Turned out we were both more interested in work and our careers than we were in each other. We talked about it and decided it was a mistake for which neither of us were to blame. Just one of those things that didn't work, so instead of ending up miserable and disliking each other, we'd call it a day …' She giggled. ‘Barry did the divorce for free and I abandoned any claim for alimony.'

‘Just like that!' said Parnell.

‘It was a good deal. We end up friends, even go out together sometimes. His folks are dead, like mine are now, and we spent last Christmas together at Aspen. Barry paid.'

‘All very grown-up and civilized,' said Parnell. He wasn't going to discover the great unsaid – maybe there was nothing to learn.

‘Waste of time being any other way.' She looked around her, at an obvious exodus. ‘About time we made a move, don't you think?'

They didn't bother to go to the bar at the intermission, and afterwards Parnell declared himself a fan of big band. ‘Do you feel like a drink now?'

‘Not in a bar.'

‘I guess I'm going to have to get used to this directness.'

‘That's if you want to.'

‘I think I do.'

They went to Beverley's apartment at Dupont Circle without discussion. They did open wine but neither finished their first glass, although when they got into the bedroom and Parnell realized his nervousness he wished he had, because it might have helped. They kissed a lot and began exploring and searching each other, which initially made it worse for him. But Beverley was very patient, relaxing, stopping, quietly caressing, and gradually his tension eased away and they joined in perfect rhythm and climaxed together to her tiny, sobbing mew.

When he was able, Parnell said: ‘I didn't think …'

But she put her fingers gently against his lips, stopping him, and said: ‘But you did and it was wonderful.'

The lighting that night was much better outside Beverley's apartment than it had been at Washington Circle, and the photographs of their entering together were much better and the prints were timed, too. They were again timed, at ten thirty-three, when Parnell and Beverley left again the following morning, and sharper still in the bright daylight.

‘So, what did Dingley say?' Beverley asked as they got into her car.

‘It was going slowly but he was hopeful,' replied Parnell. ‘He called it a step at a time.'

Thirty-One

C
riminal investigation – particularly interrogation – is surprisingly a near-science of routine: comparing one person to another, one answer against another, overlaying one human template on top of another, seeking out the misplaced word, the displaced fact, the slightest chink in the protective wall that people who see themselves in danger try to build. That is the psychological ethos inculcated at Quantico and which Howard Dingley and David Benton religiously observed with Dubette research vice president Dwight Newton, although they were never professionally to know how effective it was.

It required, as it had with the others, that Newton be brought into the FBI field office and unsettlingly accompanied by lawyers, as always Dubette's Peter Baldwin and Gerry Fletcher, whom Newton loyally elected to retain. It was Fletcher who immediately challenged the FBI demand for their being summoned into Washington – as well as the use of a tape recording – Newton having already co-operated fully at the first interview, for which the FBI agents had courteously travelled out to McLean, and beyond which neither he nor his client could imagine any further help was possible.

‘We most definitely do not – did not – intend any discourtesy,' said the soft-cop rehearsed Dingley. ‘There's a lot coming in at us, from every which way – we've imposed upon your good nature in asking you to come here.'

‘You're getting somewhere?' quickly asked Newton. He hoped his suit jacket was as effective as his white laboratory coat in covering the sweat rings. They had to have something (what, for Christ's sake!) to bring him in like this.

‘Still trying to fit pieces together,' said Benton, the placating clichés arranged in his mind like cards in a poker game. ‘That's how we hope you will be able to help us.'

‘How?' said Fletcher, on behalf of his client.

‘That flight number's our biggest problem,' insisted Dingley. ‘I know we talked about it before, Professor Newton, but have you had any thoughts – recollections – since our first meeting, how it came to be in Rebecca's purse?'

‘I told you then, absolutely not.'

‘You most certainly did,' agreed Benton, as if in sudden recollection. ‘We didn't know then that you'd accessed Richard Parnell's personnel file the day after he was arrested. Why'd you do that?'

‘Professor Newton had every right and authority to access the records, as Richard Parnell's immediate superior,' said Baldwin.

‘We're not doubting that he had,' said Dingley. ‘Our question is why.'

‘Dick had been arrested – I'd tried to arrange his legal representation,' said Newton, itching around his back and sides from the soaking perspiration, and exaggerating the shrug in an effort to relieve it. Not feeling able to explain that it had been personally to discover from the log – not the file that had been his excuse for consulting it – whether the omnipotent Johnson had examined it prior to the encounter in Showcross's office, Newton desperately extemporized: ‘I wondered if there might have been anything there that could have helped.'

Dingley and Benton went through their look-exchanging formula, as if each was inviting the other to ask the obvious question. It was Dingley who spoke. ‘Mr Parnell already had independent legal representation the day after he was arrested. By noon there were newscasts indicating that the case against him might collapse. You're not registered as having taken the records out until two ten that afternoon.'

‘And only looked at them for just under ten minutes,' added Benton.

‘That's how long it took me to realize that it was a stupid idea – that there couldn't possibly be anything there,' said Newton. ‘I was …' There was another irritation-relieving shoulder twitch. ‘… just trying to help. Like I said, until it was obvious how pointless it was … I was casting around … a well-respected and loved member of Dubette had died …'

‘You were there, in Burt Showcross's office,' said Dingley. ‘Tell us about the arrest.'

‘I don't understand.' said Newton. He was being sucked down again, the water coming in more quickly to engulf him.

‘Did you get the impression there had been a lot of discussion between Harry Johnson and the two Metro DC police officers before you all got together in Burt Showcross's office?' asked Benton.

Yes, which was why I looked at the personnel records, thought Newton. He said: ‘I didn't think about it … I guess there was … what …? An affinity, I guess. They were all police officers – Harry was, once. They have a way of behaving … talking …' He had to get out, stop this sort of questioning! He was going to be dragged down. Destroyed. He didn't want to be destroyed by a system and an environment and people – a person – who believed himself to be God. All he wanted – the only thing he wanted – was to escape, to run away somewhere, anywhere, and hide and never be found again.

‘Think about it now,' urged Dingley. ‘Parnell's arrest doesn't seem right to us – almost as if it had been decided upon in advance.'

‘Is that a focus of your investigation?' demanded Fletcher. ‘That's surely a matter for the separate enquiry initiated against the two officers by Mr Parnell?'

‘Difficult not to cross boundary lines,' smiled Benton, in empty apology. ‘We're troubled by what seem to have been assumptions, without obvious evidence to support the action that was taken.'

‘I don't see how my client can possibly help you with that,' said Fletcher.

‘No,' quickly said Newton, seizing the more immediate, open-door escape. ‘I can't help you with any of this Honestly, he said: ‘I was shocked by it all … by Rebecca's death … how she died …'

‘How was that?' persisted Benton, at once. ‘When the officers told you … more importantly, when they told Parnell. Exactly
what
did they say had happened?'

Newton hesitated, trying to anticipate the pitfalls. ‘That there'd been a traffic accident. That Rebecca had died.'

‘Did they give any details of the accident?' asked Dingley.

Where was the trap? The thing he should or shouldn't say? ‘I think they said there'd been a collision … I can't properly remember … that Rebecca's car had been forced into a canyon, I think … I'm not sure …'

‘Forced into a canyon?' echoed Dingley.

What were the implications of those words? ‘Something like that. I told you, I can't properly remember … can't swear to anything …'

‘You're not being asked to swear to anything, Professor Newton …' said Dingley.

‘Not yet,' finished Benton.

‘Do you have a case to make against anyone?' demanded Baldwin, at once.

‘Not yet,' said Dingley, in a tone indicating that it could be imminent.